so, you know i might be able to i don't know, publish published an article and some milder kind of ecology if i am lucky, whereas thomas friedman, who pours out a kind of kind of nonsense about globalization, and how you know how it's going to save us all based on his interviews with corporate ceos or whatever, this major coverage all the time.

so the alternative voice historically can't get a voice and they can't get one now. and anybody, look, the classic case is noam chomsky who for something like dirty years was publishing his luck with south end press in boston which can -- consisted of two guys and a pipe breaker. he never got reviewed. i mean it was like a total blackout. the united states is not interested in criticism and frankly, de tocqueville said this very well in 1831. he said that americans live and an of self congratulation and if you bring up any problems they immediately get various. that has only gotten worse since 1831 but even back then what i'm saying is that alternative voice

doesn't have a chance and the media doesn't even have to be told by the government, watch your step. they are self censoring. they watch their step. they may even believe it too. >> it might be a little off the subject that i was wondering if maybe he thought tomorrow's emergency alert system response tomorrow is going to have a big impact on media. the way i see it as the government is going to be taking control over media. >> i didn't know anything about this to tell you the truth. >> wideout you say something about it? >> tomorrow at 10 in the homeland security and fema are doing a joint effort, the first-ever emergency alert system. they will be broadcasting kind of like everyone remembers back in the early 70s back when they would stand by on the tv and what they will be doing is

broadcasting over television and also over radio. i also look at apparently they are using that binary link which is apparently the computers that are processing links together so they can put something on line so they can actually apparently. >> like we were talking about earlier with the orwellian basically over the same thing over and over at grocery stores. >> i mean i honestly don't know what's going on its is first time i've heard of it but i have to say that first of all, one obvious possibility is that it's a dry run for later usage, you know. and then, as well, it works very well in a system such as ours around heightened managed democracy so to speak to keep the population in a state of fear. that is very very important week is than then you can do anything. everything is national security, you know.

>> during the last, during the last guardian there have been big articles about the possibility of the united states and/or israel to bomb iran. do you know if they are propagating this bomb and everything, but it's not really discussed that much, you know, domestically. and also, i read a little part of in the guardian that says well, an election is coming and obama needs to consider whether bombing iran you know, how this will be tied to the possibilities of re-election.

so this is, it's kind of a déjà vu kind of thing. i don't know. >> i mean it's a very old tactic. gaza was for -- before and israeli election in the end of 2009 so it's a very old tactic. i didn't realize the u.s. was in on it. i have seen stuff on television with regard to israel getting closer and closer to doing this. you know i mean the irony is there apparently are something like 200 warheads in the pomona facility in the desert and you know iran probably doesn't have enough make nuclear power to light up a few watches so here we are going to -- why do they have the right to have nuclear weapons and iran doesn't? [inaudible]

>> right, right, right and i can't comment extensively about that but i think israel will, as it happens israel will do the job for the united states. the important thing about, i mean the united states and getting into any of this is in order to function the united states needs an enemy. it needs an enemy that is constantly present and preferably a war. and so, libya you know what's was next on the agenda. actually there was a wonderful line by michele bachmann at the presidential debates in september. she said, obama has invaded libya and now he is moving on to africa. [laughter] did she think libya was in

northern europe? i mean, you know. a serious presidential candidate. you tell me this country is not overt? but you know, i mean there is no doubt in my mind that 10 years from now, we will be making more on some country on the other side of the planet, spending trillions of dollars on it. chad, to ghana, antarctica, it doesn't matter. we have got to have an enemy in order to function. that is the whole problem with negative identity. i mean the only way america could possibly -- slow the mess down is what jimmy carter wanted to do, stop blaming the outside he said. let's look at ourselves. it was a very christian point of view, don't look at, what is the line, respect your enemy?

>> yeah, right. so i mean that is what we need to do of course. you know the result, he was voted out of office and a buffoon was elected for eight years he basically sponsored that in latin america and said ketchup was a vegetable. >> hi, to paraphrase your postmortem comment, i had a question. in the postmortem a valuation of the patient i guess you could say hey this guy could have lived longer if he would have done this or enriches fact if you take that same, your book as the postmortem of america what can we do? to extend our time here and the nation? >> well what does happen in a

place like this, if you can compare it to in organisms that died, what happens in those faces is the organism throws out antibodies that are attempting basically to prolong life or get active health or something like that. i would say that the impulse behind occupy wall street is that of an antibody trying to say well if you have a situation where 1%, the top 1% owns more collectively than the bottom 90%, you know, what do you have got to do is address that in balance so there would be part of the solution and part of the demand and so on. how do we actually make that happen is another story but at least their analysis is severe social inequality is the death of a society that has to be addressed. other antibodies include myself

and kline and those who are saying red flag and that type of thing. but, i really don't, i actually feel it's too late. in fact a friend of mine wrote me the other day that he thought the wall street protest, you know, was analogous to chemotherapy for the terminally ill. and it just may be too late for any of this. but, in the book the twilight of american culture i compare the united states to the late roman empire and identify the factors that were the same and i said, here is what you have got to do. you know you have to reverse all these things. not believing for a minute that anybody's going to pay any attention. i figured that i would sell 12 books. it wasn't much more. my mother bought four copies.

[laughter] so you know, there things that are quite clear like rebalancing the social inequality for example or the fact that if you have 77% of the school system not knowing what george washington was, maybe we ought to take a look at the curriculum, remove as delauter and stuff like that. but i mean the real question is sort of to me, not what should be done because i think those things are obvious but what most likely is to occur, what is most likely to occur quite honestly is that kim kardashian will be -- in a couple of years from now. i would not be that shocked and so it is sort of like you know arnold point he said this in the study of history and gerald dimond both of them said what is

characteristic of a dying civilization that in the dying face it does precisely those things that accelerate and you can count on it to kill itself even faster and that is what we are seeing. so we invaded libya, on to africa. anybody else? see do you think it is communities not working properly compared to india? this is not happening here. they don't talk -- do you think that is something basic we have to pay attention to? >> those are major differences. 's be and to add to that, the

mexican community, they have stronger community ties. [inaudible] that never happens with the white person from erica. >> in his probably most famous essay labyrinth of solitude, he says that what is in mexico is considered community relations and in the united states it's considered contamination. it is harsh but it's true.

americans don't want to talk to each other and they don't want contact with each other. they just want to live in an anima is bubble and there are a lot of factors for why there is more of a social safety net in europe. i would recommend to anybody here, we are seeing a struggle but i would recommend to anybody this book talking about differences between the united states direction and europe's direction. the tradition of extreme individualism goes back to the late 16th century in the united states and it's so incensed that to even ask your neighbor for help is considered a sign of weakness. i mean that is how, it's pathological ideology, and you

know i run a blog for those of you interested. it is just morris berman.com and i run a blog and people who live outside the united states will frequently comment that the one reason that they are happy to the outside of the united states is that there is a feeling of we are are all in this together. that does not exist in the united states. go over to the management section at barnes & noble, looking out for number one and the brand name and me, myself and i. it's one book after another that says your job and life is to screw everybody else and be on top of the -- and on that note, thank you very much. [applause] >> coming up next booktv

presents a boy in an hour-long program where we invite guest host to interview authors. this week richard thompson ford and his book, "universal rights down to earth." mr. ford argues there are unforeseen issues when western nations try to change the lives of millions by enforcing what they believe are universal human rights. he discusses these issues with former chief operating officer of human rights watch, council on foreign relations fellow suzanne nossel. >> host: high a rich. glad to be here with you this afternoon. really enjoyed the chance to read "universal rights down to earth." i'd like to start off by asking what drove you to training your lens on the human rights movement? with that made -- with me that a subject of interest for you? >> guest: most of my work has been in the area of civil rights and i've been interested in questions of rights for quite a

long time. a little background. in the 1980s when i was in law school, there was a quite heated debate between legal scholars all on the left about the question of rights. and i was just a student at that time but found it very interesting between a group that has come to be known of critical legal studies and another group mainly scholars of color, that later became known as critical race theory and the debate was about the status of rights when they go rights were a good idea and whether they were and the critical position was one that became known as the critique of rights so they had a number of criticisms, number of concerns about these rights most of which have to do with worries about the way they shaped political consciousness, the way they

affected political movements and the response was people that became known as with the critical race theory was quite powerful. particularly civil rights for dispossessed or subordinated groups in very strong terms. i found that to be fascinating and i think both sides made that very valid point about the status of rights and when rights can be useful as opposed to potentially counterproductive, both the costs and benefits to rights and so in so the one thing that he came clear to me was that there is a general conception that rights, more rights would be better. we should extend rights for more situations, more people, more context and the critical legal studies critique made some really powerful points against that idea, against the rights are always good and suggested that we think of rights maurice tools to achieve some and and

the important question was whether or not describing something in terms of rights would be a good mechanism for achieving the substantive and and/or whether it might be counterproductive. now again, that i think never was quite resolved. in fact it certainly wasn't but there were second generations of examinations of rights by some of my colleagues at stanford. other people who i know and respect a great deal have looked at how an assertion of a right would play out in a particular institutional context so rather than asking in general terms would it be a good idea to have rights against this type of discrimination, once you have at what happens on the ground? what happens to a particular institution? just to give you a concrete example of what i mean by that, we have rights against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion and

disability, very important legal entitlements for people and places of employment, public accommodations and housing. a question however, how does it play out on the ground requires one to look at the specific dynamics of employment so one lesson and this is a lesson that came from vicki schultz, a scholar at yale law school, is that while the uptake of rights happen not in court, you can't figure out from what you seen the statute or the legal precedent but it happens and how it is taken up by human resource advantages at a relatively low level so the way civil rights laws get interpreted through human resources managers, through management consultants to employment lawyers is an important aspect of what this means to have a legal right and sometimes they turn out in ways

that one would not have anticipated and perhaps one would have even wanted. so that is lesson that i thought would be interesting to bring to bear in questions of human rights that are obfuscated at a high level of generality and extraction. what happens on the ground when they're actually implement it? what are the effects of articulating something, describing a particular social conflict or of particular concern in terms of rights? >> host: i would agree with you that that debate rages on. having worked on human rights issues both within government, questions like what rights should the united states be prepared to acknowledge or affirm. for example at the united nations, these questions are very much a life. what would a technologist right as enforceable? what would be the real world consequences of signing on to the notion of an entitlement or

a value as a right? also the debate along those lines within the non-governmental sector and human rights organizations. so i certainly think that this is a debate and the equity that you are exposed to are very relevant here. i am curious, i don't know what in your book went to press, but it the pub date is 2011 and i don't know to what degree you are able to bring it into your lands the events of the arab spring that unfolded over the last year and whether that outpouring and all of the energy and kind of unexpected quality and the power of that movement and that assertion of a think what was often referred to as a demand for rights and it's more than that but did that shape

your thinking at all? >> guest: unfortunately the book was written before those events occurred and i would love to have been able to write about them but couldn't. i can't say that they informed my thinking and in fact since the manuscript was sent to press i've been thinking a lot about arab spring, about events in india around anticorruption, about occupy wall street, all vibrant social movements that some of which take up the language of rights and some of which don't in ways that surprised me quite frankly because very often when a progressive social movement emerges, it does adopt the language of human rights in one form or another. we may well be entering what we call the human rights century and there's a tendency to strike more and more social conflicts

and issues in terms of rights and human rights. now, to some extent this is a testament to the power of rights and the human imagination. they really have captured the imagination of people across the world in a wide variety of circumstances and inspired people to take action fork justice and that is the profound remedy of the human rights movement and its success over the past dude decades. at the same time, based on my study, mainly of rights in the domestic sphere, the questions arise about whether or not, what was in fact thinking about the group in terms of rights might be in this is the place where i found some interesting things. on the one hand, often when i

talk to people engaged in human rights work or human rights advocacy and i talked to them about the specifics of rights, legal entitlement, enforceable and what are the specific remedies, who would be responsible for guaranteeing the rights? they would say you know that is not really where we are coming from. when we say something is a human rights issue, we need to advocate for comprehensive social change and in some cases people have even said we don't talk about entitlement and enforcement. we talk about helping them through which is very interesting from a domestic view. sounds not so much like rights for something different. so there is an interesting question about the status of rights in the discourse. at the same time, very often there would be at crucial moments a reference to entitlement, the imagined

potential of enforcement in some sort of authoritative body, all of the hallmark characteristics of orderly speaking and it's fascinating and again would give human rights great deal of their power. find critical i don't want to be specifically opposed because that is certainly not the case but it does leave questions that i thought by my examinations i am i'm hoping i'm able to shed light on. >> host: you make the point in your book and you have touched on this in our conversation already, that you see human rights at least in part as a means to an and and the question needs to be asked about whether there is the right tool for the job. who should decide that? is that a decision that the rights advocate should make?

should the victim of the alleged abuses make that decision? should a court make that decision? you know, where does that get adjudicated? who do you see as the rightful judge? >> guest: that is a really interesting question. a short answer, all of the above. the wrong answer, i want people to think about rights advocacy in this context as an intervention and a social field and an intervention that is a lot like policy making. human rights advocates have been human rights agenda or are you put pressure on government or other organizations on the basis of human rights making a policy intervention and they have some degree of power in this respect. when people do this kind of social advocacy they say we rid

don't really have power, we are speaking truth to power. we are constraining the power of other people but in some contexts certainly human rights advocates and non-governmental organizations can have a great deal of power as players in international politics. and so, one answer to the question is yes, the abacus should ask the question in describing it in terms of human rights good way of achieving our humanitarian goals? what is at stake in the conflict? or is it going to make it perhaps harder to see what is the sake in a given conflict are make it easy to ignore some of the potential outcomes or consequences of an intervention? is it likely to help us to achieve our goals by convincing people and certainly describing things in rights often is an extremely effective reticent for

convincing others to take action but is it likely to do that or is it likely to perhaps in some cases encourage the wrong type of action and they could harder to see all of the stakes involved? those are questions that everybody ought to ask. >> host: as someone who has worked on human rights issues both in government and currently at amnesty international which is one of the organizations that you touch on to some extent in your book, i am curious what is your understanding of the state of the debate within organizations like amnesty over those issues? my experience honestly has been that those things are debated rigorously and there are, you know these organizations are known for nothing so much as

they are opinionated senior stack and -- staff and program directors and there's always a full range of viewpoints. my sense is there is a vigorous debate but perhaps what you are seeing is the outcome somehow not reflecting what you might regard as the right talents between these competing considerations. so i wonder if you could touch on, is it a procedural shortcomings that these debates aren't happening or somehow our debates happening but the outcomes aren't always as refined as they might be? >> guest: well i certainly do not think that the debates aren't happening. that is not the not the claim i want to make. i would like to think that it could help to inform those

debates by bringing new perspectives and let me say this as well. these kinds of questions come up in the domestic context as well and they are similar so it's not as if the only context with which these kinds of considerations are relevant at night think might be a thing to add to the debate is in the concept of international rights, certainly not. and i don't mean to suggest that those limitations are, the human rights organizations are not going to do the job of having these debates. i only mean to suggest that, it does seem to me that there is a potential for -- primarily in terms of rights but to affect the discussion, my sense is talking to people involved with these organizations is that

maybe a may be a risk in some contexts. it's not that people don't have a discussion about whether it's not a good idea to engage in a particular type of advocacy but whether or not it might be in some circumstances better to describe in terms that don't involve rights and then of course there's the question of which organization would be best out that? an organization whose primary focus is to do something that doesn't involve rights are not? i don't have an answer to those questions. i'm simply posing them. >> host: i think they are good questions and they get at -- there is not always readily available set of terms or language in which to let these debates play out.

one thing that occurred to me and reading your book, you know, you assert the idea that there are times, and i hope i characterized it barely, but there are times when human rights advocacy sort of barrels forward without taking into account the full range of policy considerations, inequities that it should and you give an example of work on women's rights in the city of san francisco and its decision to invest in improved street lighting to help safeguard women who are vulnerable to violence, walking home at night. you sort of say this is an obvious policy good for women but you know can we be sure that the discussion took into account

the trade-off here? installing those lights meant fewer resources to upgrade play spaces for children and how could we be sure that the proper weighing of those equities to place? you know i think what you are suggesting there is that human rights advocates they are a gift greater responsibility to consistently shoulder to do some of that playing weighing and my question is this. having sat around a for i.d. at different tables and discussing issues, in my mind there's a big difference between a senior staff meeting at amnesty international and the inter-agency meeting at the white house. at the amnesty discussion we are a human rights advocate and our job is to bring human rights

lands to whatever is the debate may be. it is that inter-agency table where you have the state department, the human rights bureau and you might have the pentagon and the treasury department. you know, there are many different voices on the table and the facilitator of that conversation has to kind of pull it all together. human rights is only one piece, but i guess my question is do you really see it as a responsibility to human rights advocates to do that weighing up or is it rather their job to be the human rights voice in the debate and let the rest of the political process and the other actors balance it out? >> guest: this is a great question. if i could clarify one thing about the san francisco neighborhood. in my mind that as an example of a success story because what they have done there, and they talked to some of the women involved in this advocacy so i don't want anyone to think that i'm critical of that. i want to say that is an example

of a cooperative relationship with the city. they were talking about, and it moved outside of rights formerly were classically understood. when i talk to them, they said we weren't talking about an individual having entitlement. we were talking about how we can make the city more responsive to the concerns of women in helping them to come up with ways to measure how successful they were. we worked with the city and we came up with an audit in order to evaluate the city's policies and the city was very helpful. i thought that was fabulous and very interesting as a shift away from individual entitlement, potentially litigation or a focus on that kind of relative informal idea of rights to something much more comprehensive. now what i did want to suggest though is part of the discussion that you refer to is that as one

moves away from strict advocacy and into the consulting type role, the person is becoming an adjunct of government, and here i want to suggest a sharp line between government and non-governmental organizations are between advocates and the states the comes -- against a become blurred. this is not the way in which non-governmental organizations are players in the policy when they are actually exercising political power and that is a good things. but it's a shift away from the typical kind of high school civics idea of the way government works. now, when one adopts that role, yes there is a greater responsibility to think about the range of consequences. someone needs to do it. i understand that typically it is the africa's role in it may

seem unfair that the abacus has to take on that responsibility along with all the responsibilities they are taking on. but there is a broad question that i believe is raised in the time we begin to describe a particular set of issues in terms of rights, which is, which issues are plausible to describe his rights in which are left out? given the fact that their rights analysis typically understands as one legal theorist theorist put it as a trump, something that takes precedence over another consideration and something in something that jumps acute. then you worry about the other stuff put under the consideration of competing and trade-offs. that is the aspiration.

given that, yes i think there is some responsibility to think through whether the particular issue that is that place at play should jump the queue or whether the policy balance should happen. i want to be clear. i'm not saying that policy balance is wrong in san francisco. i think it's right. i think the city has neglected the concerns of women for a long time in the city is able to see how they can improve -- improve advocacy so is only using that as an example of the kinds of concerns that might become more pronounced as we move into what what we could call a second-generation of human rights advocacy and a less formal rights adjudication where the judge or parties responsible for deviating these concerns and something that is more like this kind of consulting work. my sense it is becoming more and more prevalent within human rights work. >> host: you know, just to

respond to your last assertion, you know that is the coming of the major area of work but i think also it is helpful to keep in mind the distinction between that kind of engagement with a willing partner in the form of a government, the city government of san francisco or the new government of tunisia that welcome's human rights technical assistance from the un's u.n.'s offer of the high commissioner to cover tunisia and helped draft and train personnel. versus human rights advocacy in the situation where a government is recalcitrant, bashar assad for example. to work cooperatively and the emphasis really is on how to ratchet up treasure on that government and tried to fight for change. i think more so perhaps then the

idea that carrying out the balance of the burden, think it's not so much that as you know, when an applicant is truly playing in advocacy role, you know, in the context of a situation where they are trying to apply pressure to drive change, that by doing that balancing and taking into full account you know, the range of competing equities that may weigh against human rights claim, think the reason that is done is it acknowledges or recognizing that is done by a big court officials on the receiving end of the advocacy but it's the advocates job to stake out a strong position and recognize that through this policymaking process, you know,

other considerations will come into the debate in the final outcome is probably not going to you now look like for cicely that set of recommendations that the advocate has put out. but by putting out the strong set of recommendations, the advocate will help ensure that the outcome is just a little bit closer along the spectrum to the desired, the otherwise the cases that worked through all these competing considerations, financial and strategic depending on the context. so you know what you accept that it is the appropriate role for human rights advocate to sort of stakeout that part of the spectrum in acknowledgment that the final outcome won't wind up there but that if somebody doesn't stakeout that position, then it will be even further watered down and these competing considerations returned to the

mix. >> guest: it is absolutely appropriate and one of the challenges of discussing the human rights field is that there is such a broad range of potential sites of intervention in a broad range of differing circumstances. i think you're absolutely right that there is a huge difference between advocacy and the context of a recalcitrant state and advocacy and consulting in the context of a friendlier state. absolutely, and part of the concern is that in the backdrop of all of this you have the idea that each instinct which is some articulation of human rights and so one question that i pose is whether even in the context of consulting one is more a mode of

advocacy that is what we typically do in the aspect of human rights and you now as if we were advocating in the context of a recalcitrant state. so you are suggesting is right in line with what i suggest in the book which is that the differing contexts may require differing roles. the fact that we are describing it in terms of rights doesn't mean that we need to do the same thing on the ground in each instance. but i wonder whether that will be harder to see in the trenches. >> host: why don't you go back do you know the point that i think you make persuasively which i think is true, that human rights advocates have become you know powerbrokers of a sort. there are occasions where you now here in washington or in brussels or even perhaps in

cairo or benghazi, people are listening to and thinking about what the human rights organizations are saying. .. in the context in some of the recent debates between the

republican candidates for the nomination. you attribute as i a understanding at at least in part you attribute the failure to more firmly entrenched the absolute ban on torture on, you know, when you see as the language of rights to include things like rights to housing or rights to food, you know, that really kind of in your mind i think call into question the meaning of rights and the enforceability of rights, your suggestion as by invoking the right language in those areas the advocates have weakened the force of the norm against torture. but what i wonder is isn't the state of the debate on torture more for reflection of the limited power of the human rights movement and the fact that these ideas codified on paper in the convention against

torture and other human rights instruments that they are not fully understood, appreciated, accepted even by the senior government officials. to me that demonstrates the progress that human rights advocates have made in kind of from time to time being able to touch the levers of power is really finite, and limited. >> guest: i agree with all of that, and i don't want to overstate the case but to suggest the reason we don't have strong growth provisions on cloture entirely is because we watered down rights in these other contexts. but i do want to suggest there's a trade-off to be made, there is a potential for the inflation of the currency when there's

certain things, certain issues where the language of rights is an easy and a need fix where the question is the actor in question who needs to comply and guarantee the right is clear whether there should be no compromise. there are no competing revisions come there are no trade-offs. we would say look, the fact one thinks you could get some use of the information out of a prisoner by torturing him or her just doesn't cut it and we are not trading off the balancing equity at this point. can we just agree on that? >> host: other things vitally important and i don't want to suggest -- one of the things of one to focus on is the not focus for the rights it doesn't mean it's less important people it

means rights are a good tool for getting it, they are not helping to clarify the issues at stake and are not helping us get where we need to go. i have questions about whether or not it describes food and housing as a writer when the ability to practically guarantee that is so much more complex, requires the relations in so many different institutions and economic factors and political trade-offs are the type where it's an inevitable that we are making progress or we are doing the best we can on balance or there are other parties involved but we can't control and we aren't sure who the right is good against that thinking of flights in those terms as involving trade offs and balancing might bleed over into the cases where there shouldn't be trade-offs and balance so that is a worry, and again this is a worry that i take from the domestic context we see the same thing in the domestic rights as

well but to the extent you begin to have lights that basically boiled down to policy balancing a strong inclination is to move almost all rights in the direction of the policy. most of these policy balancing is the right way to go because the policy question but sometimes it's not. so there's a question of tradeoff there. now again i don't presume to answer the question or to say there for you shouldn't have the rights to advocacies on these issues. i only want to suggest that there is a potential cost, and that cost might have had affects in the context of the torture issue, and i think we would agree we would very much like to see a stronger and more robust international norm against

certain types of things come something that is not so easily subject to manipulation as you've seen in the context of torture after 9/11. >> host: let me share with you the dilemma that we confront from time to time and amnesty international and was a subject of discussion when i was serving the government. let's take the right to food. the obama administration has a very strong principled commitment and set of policies behind food security, and they put the considerable resources and political capital behind the ambitious food security initiative program called feed the future. so that is a clear policy commitment. in the u.n. context, the

administration was confronted with the question of how to respond to resolutions, human rights resolutions on the right to food that were introduced by other countries and that's oftentimes contained provisions and losses that to varying degrees or not things that the united states could fully in place because they were muddy statements on the right poorly framed and other cases there would be considerations of intellectual property that would come into play. you know, sometimes there were legal interpretations with which the administration was not entirely comfortable. at the dilemma would become given the administration's clear policy commitment in terms of food security, the offtakes

voting against or even abstaining and declining to support a resolution that inevitably was favored by the vast majority of other countries around the world consistently vote in favor of the revolution on the right food it became difficult. and there were opportunities to articulate the exposition, but the sense that times was doesn't that just kind of get lost? and is in the message of the united states as this great standard bearer on food security voting against the right to food just impossible to explain that a human level, and how does one reconcile that disconnect? you know in your book we look at these instruments very differently than most other countries. there are many countries that

sign on to instruments and resolutions that bear no relationship to their domestic practice. and yet for us to insist that legal concerns or issues with language ought to override the sort of moral and narrative on being on the side of the right to food and the advancement of food security it becomes tough and i'm curious what to think about it. >> it's a fascinating question. one of the trickiest thing about writing this book for me was thinking through the way that particularly in the international human rights context the rights for both straddled the morrill in putative and the aspirational

ideas and more practical and formal mandates to reza from the perspective of the one goal we list or the legal positiveness what we mean by rights are the rights are just substantiated. there is a characteristic if there is a right it means somebody is entitled to demand something of someone else. we need to specify exactly who the other person is and exactly what it is they are entitled to integrate typologies of how the rights could play out in the context so they think about that in a narrow way and in some ways that is with the united states is doing when they could look at the fine print of the treaty but we don't really support that was something over here. of course the administration is also thinking the bull's-eye is on us we are the biggest player and everyone is going to come

after as soon as we violate or don't adhere to some provisions of it is tricky to sign on the. but at the same time there is enough operational side in which many people say what we mean is the right to freedom everybody should have food. who could be against that? and so the sign-on and as you said, as i discussed in the book sometimes it has no relationship to what you are actually doing and it's very difficult to think through how those interact. but that is one of the biggest challenges and it's a challenge in the domestic side too but it's a greater challenge i think in the context of the international human rights because the field is so much more chaotic. there is a wide range of the potential instruments and articulations of human-rights everyone understands that to some degree the human rights or aspirational and it doesn't mean they are formally codify or not

and there is also the form of the codification with the consequences. i think it's very -- it makes it a very challenging although also of course very promising domain. but one of the main concerns in the book is to note the way the language's right as kind occupied the field so that when one wants an international statement about food security, as you put it, it becomes articulated in the language of the rights so it takes on a particular set of characteristics that may or may not be the best way to achieve food security. so i think it is fascinating, the conflict between the right to food on the one hand and a very strong policy commitment to food security on the upper hand and in an example why talk about in the book involves india and the rate of the concern when i started to survey the field was

the idea that it is the right to food suggests it was the state clearly that was responsible. now, understanding that human rights advocacies move beyond the idea the only states or implicated. but often there is a fall back to the idea the state is the main guarantor. yet in the indian context the state was a huge part of the problem. the administrative capacities you still get some advocates namely economists that rather than ask mistakes to do more to guarantee the food security, we want them to do less. we need the state to move the distribution of food and instead provide subsidies and allow the markets to take over which seems to me to be a plausible suggestion given the decades of difficulty but looking through

the lens it might have made it harder to see that as a potential solution and even then some people do suppose that as a solution to see that as a kind of abandoning the idea that there was the right to food at this state to step back even if it was likely that having the state stepped back and would be more. spec one thing that occurred to me reading the discussion in your book is the distinction between the role of the state in providing the rights verses interfering with the exercise and enjoyment of the right. but i want to come back to the question taking into account your debate and i think you're thought-provoking discussion of the merits and disadvantages using the language of rights in the economic, social and cultural contexts like rig